RE: Color: auto, or colour fallbacks

> From: David Woolley [mailto:david@djwhome.demon.co.uk]
>
> Specifically, it would work when the author had:
> 
> background-color: #00f   or
> :link { color: #00f; }    or
> :visited { color: #00f; }   etc.

OK - I'm just trying to understand this concretely. So, if in my User Stylesheet I had:

:link { color: #0cf !important; }
:visited { color: #00f !important; }

I would always see a distinguishment between visited and unvisited links - though I would never see an author's intended link colors (regardless of their background colors).

If I changed :link to:

:link { color: auto; }

It would say "If the author's color is the same as the background or visited color, use some other color (specified where?).

This doesn't quite sound like auto so much as "contrast." Further the problem easily becomes complex. For example, what if the background-color is barely blue and the link color blue? Is that in violation of contrast rules here? Most users would find the links unreadable, yet, some may prefer this color scheme (at the very least the author).

It probably is sensible for the W3C to state guidelines for forcing textual contrast, but I'm not sure adding a color property should be part of that. The W3C could for example state:

"Usability tests show that good readability occurs at 90% contrast between text and background color, and readability seriously degrades below 70%. User Agents are encouraged to offer a "force contrast" option that, when rendering text at less-than 70% contrast, brightens and darkens the text and background as needed. User Agents could offer this as a checkbox, as a minimum contrast slider bar, etc."


-Chris "SoopahMan" Moschini
http://hiveminds.info/
http://soopahman.com/

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